FOCUS CARBON
Issue 6, Oct/Nov 2009
demands on its 15.5TB of memory.
Add to this, the two giant halls (each the size of two football pitches) that house the supercomputer will draw even vaster resources of electricity from the national grid, and these CPU monsters will need even greater efforts to cool them as they generate 24TB of data every day.
Since the tape robots that store all this data start to suffer at about 23 degrees Centigrade, the heat produced by this system will draw on even more resources for cooling.
MET Office CTO Steve Foreman
layer of the earth’s atmosphere will no longer be divided into 300,000 points, but in the near future will consist of 790,000 points.
So the 744 CPUs that make up the Met Office’s IBM supercomputer will be number- crunching more furiously than ever, the workload will edge ever nearer the machine’s capacity for 145 teraflops and make increasing
REAL CARBON OFFSETTING
The Met Office embraced the computer age in 1959, when a Ferranti Mercury – nicknamed Meteor – was purchased. Capable of completing 30,000 calculations per second, it was a major step forward in the evolution of making weather forecasts. For the first time, scientists were able to regularly use numerical methods to forecast weather patterns.
By forming an understanding of the way the atmosphere works, equations are created which seek to mirror these processes. The equations, built out of lines of computer code, combine together to make ‘models’ which are effective attempts to recreate the dynamics of the atmosphere through mathematics. They work by taking all the current weather observations available and applying the model to see what might happen next.
As our understanding of the atmosphere improved, and the number of weather observation inputs increased, the need for more computing power also grew. Thus the Met Office bought a new supercomputer in 1965, an English Electric KDF9, which could complete 50,000 calculations per second. This leap in speed – of more than 60% – allowed for faster, more complex forecasts to be made.
This pattern of advancing technology and increasingly complex models continued, with the Met Office buying successively speedier computers every five-to-10 years. By 1982, its CDC Cyber 205 could do 200 million calculations per second, and by 1997 its Cray T3E was doing more than a trillion calculations per second.
The Met Office now uses an IBM supercomputer that can do more than 100 trillion calculations per second. Its power allows it to take in hundreds of thousands of weather observations from all over the world, which it then uses as a basis for running an atmospheric model containing more than a million lines of code.
Necessarily, the supercomputer requires a large amount of energy to run and maintain – about 1.2MW of electricity each year. While everything possible is being done to minimise this, the power consumption remains small in comparison with the socio-economic benefits delivered, including CO2 emissions reductions. For example, the Met’s global aviation forecasts allow airlines to save fuel by using the wind to aid their flight to their destination. The Met Office has estimated that this alone helps save approximately 20 million tonnes of CO2 each year through increased efficiency.
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Foreman says he is rising to the challenge of lowering the system’s carbon footprint. “We’re looking at more efficient systems of cooling, possibly even free cooling,” he says. Currently, chilled water is used to cool the CPUs, but this system could be replaced when the time for an upgrade arrives.
Another excess that troubles Foreman is the heat that is generated by the CPUs. The Met’s headquarters in Exeter is so economically designed, according to Foreman, that it only ever needs heating for three days each year. So, until they can find a source that needs it, the excess heat generated by the supercomputer will have to be dissipated into the atmosphere.
A more tangible energy-saving device could soon be achieved by tailoring the power supply. “We could use direct current, which would significantly lower the power use,” explains Foreman. “You lose less power than with AC and you get a better rate of power conversion.”
The challenge would be in finding an uninterruptible power supply that works with direct current. Given the scale of the challenges the Met Office has already faced, it should come as no surprise if it were to solve this one.
There are still many riddles and conundrums to be solved before we can predict the British weather, let alone climate change. Some involve the Met Office itself – logically, one would expect the Met Office to be a fan of cloud computing.
However, it is honing its intelligence and advancing to a perfect understanding of the weather.
And when it does, what will we talk about then?
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